A Matter of Waiting, a Question of Time
by black.k.kat
Summary: Companion piece to Continue Firm and Constant, set after 'Greeks Bearing Gifts.' Chocolate ice cream might not mend a broken heart, but Ianto brings it anyway. Tosh might not be ready to hear what he has to say, but she still listens. They're far too alike for comfort, after all.


**Rating:** PG-13

**Word count:** ~ 2,200

**Warnings: **Angst, heartbreak, mentions of canonical character death.

**Disclaimer: **All recognizable characters are the property of their respective owners. I am in no way associated with the creators, and no copyright infringement is intended.

**A/N: **This can be seen as set in the same universe as _Continue Firm and Constant_, my other Tosh-Ianto friendship fic, if you'd like. Of course, it stands just fine alone. I love Tosh, and wanted to write something for _Greeks Bearing Gifts_, so this is the result. The (old) title (sorry about that, changed it) comes from an excerpt of an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem: _After all, my erstwhile dear/My no longer cherished/Need we say it was not love/Just because it perished?_

* * *

_**A Matter of Waiting, a Question of Time  
**_

Her apartment still smells like Mary.

Tosh can't quite define it—cigarette smoke, musk, and something lightly spicy. She remembers it, though, remembers it heartbreakingly well. After sleeping last night wrapped in it, wrapped up in Mary, she's not entirely certain she'll ever be able to forget—nor is she entirely certain she wants to.

Mary might have betrayed her, might have been the villain in this piece, but Tosh still loved her. There had to be _something_ loveable about her, if that's true. Even if it was just her wildness, her capricious kindness, there was something about Mary that Tosh could love. And she did. Does.

But now her apartment is empty and smells like Mary, and Mary is gone, sent to the center of the sun by Jack. Tosh has never hated Jack before, has never wanted to hurt him quite as much as she did before she fled the Hub—she's used to him being the invincible captain, the hero, _her_ hero who pulled her out of that UNIT cell. But she'd looked at him and wanted to hurt him, wanted to _bury_ him, even though Mary had used her so completely.

One moment, one instant of carelessness with her heart, and this is what she gets.

Tosh leans back against the front door and closes her eyes. Her legs give way beneath her and she slides down, slowly, carefully. If she makes any fast movements right now, she'll break apart, and then Ianto will have to come and pack her life up into neat little boxes the way he's so good at.

"Should have stuck with Owen, Sato," she whispers to herself, hands rising, fingers twining in her hair the same way Mary's had just hours ago. There's no reaction to her own touch, though, no scalding heat and overwhelming _want_ like she felt when Mary touched her.

But it wasn't _Mary_. That wasn't even her real name. She was a fake, a construction designed solely to seduce, maneuver, and trick Tosh into bringing her to Torchwood.

Except for the parts of her that weren't. Tosh won't—_can't_—believe that it was all false. She saw into Mary's thoughts, if only briefly, and surely not all of that could be faked.

Tosh brings her knees up to bury her face against them, wrapping her arms around herself. This must be, she thinks, a little of what Ianto feels all the time. The thoughts she overheard are burned into her mind, sharp and agonizing, and she wants to cry because she _understands_. Jack killed her lover, too. They were both aliens, both dangerous, and both beloved. It doesn't matter that Ianto had Lisa for years and Tosh only had Mary for a few days—the heart isn't biased like that. All that matters is that she loved, and lost, and it's not better this way than never to have loved at all. It's a thousand bloody times worse.

A soft knock sounds on the door, startling. Tosh jumps a little and staggers to her feet—she's too polite to ignore the door, even if the last thing she wants is to socialize right now. It could be Jack—or worse, Gwen, whose only thoughts after Mary's death were of herself and her affair. For the heart of Torchwood, she's disgustingly self-centered.

(The thought that it might be Owen doesn't even register. The Devil will learn to ice-skate before Owen shows any decent human emotion at all.)

It's not Jack or Gwen, though, and as she pulls open the door Tosh has to wonder why she's surprised to find Ianto on her front step, holding a paper grocery sack and an expression of pained camaraderie. When Tosh simply blinks at him for a moment, he offers her a sad smile and hefts the sack a little higher.

"May I?" he asks, more formal than he has any right to be after seeing her in nothing but a tank top and panties following the cannibal incident.

It's the memory of that, of sharing his bed and holding onto him (being held) as they slept, that makes Tosh take a step to the side so he can enter. Ianto nods his thanks, toeing off his shoes in the entry hall and making his way towards the kitchen—the kitchen where Mary first revealed she was an alien, and _God_, will Tosh never be able to walk around her own house again without being overwhelmed by the memories?

Agony beats at her, the pain in her chest—her _heart_—almost driving her to her knees again. But a strong, elegant hand appears under her elbow, holding her up before she can fall. A moment later arms close around her, gentle but firm, and she's pulled against an equally firm chest. There's a suit jacket under her cheek—Ianto must not have gone home yet, must have come straight here from the Hub, and that shouldn't surprise her either, but it does.

"Shh, _cariad_," he murmurs in her ear, cheek pressed to her hair as deft hands stroke her back. It's only as he says it that Tosh realizes she's shaking with silent sobs, the tears so hot they burn her eyes. Ianto is so much taller than her, than marry, but he seems to fold himself down, wrap himself around her in a careful way that makes her feel precious, protected. Usually he's so unassuming and polite that he seems her size, and it's hard to remember that he's of a height with Jack. Right now, though, he's a knight in Armani pinstripes, so large and warm and terribly, achingly _human_. He smells like clean, unscented soap and rosemary shampoo and coffee, and it's enough to make her cry all over again.

Mary is _gone_ and _dead_ and she's _never coming back_, and Tosh is going to have to live with that knowledge for the rest of her life, forever wondering if there was anything she could have done to save her. Maybe Mary didn't deserve saving in the eyes of anyone else, but Tosh would still have helped her, even then and after everything.

She was in love. There was no other choice.

Ianto is murmuring in her ear, the soft Welsh words a lilting blur in her mind, interspersed here and there with oddly accented Japanese. Tosh hadn't known that he knew it, hasn't ever heard it spoken with a Welsh inflection, and it's enough to prompt a soft, watery laugh as she shakes in Ianto's arms.

"Hush," he says again, still holding her tightly, but he's smiling a little, too, as if he knows what she's thinking. That's not a nice thought, not after the day she's had, but Ianto's always been borderline psychic. It's nothing new, and actually somewhat comforting.

At length, though, Ianto draws back a little, testing first to be sure she can remain standing on her own. He keeps a hold of her hand, using it to draw her with him into the kitchen and down onto a chair. "Sit," he says firmly, and then sets a pint of ice cream and a spoon on the counter in front of her, keeping another for himself. Tosh blinks at it for a moment, uncomprehending.

"Hey." Ianto's soft voice makes her look up into stormy blue eyes, full of so much compassion and empathy that she wants to cry again because it's so much of what she needs. "Eat. There are few things in the world that chocolate ice cream can't cure."

Tosh picks up her spoon and opens the carton to find that it is, indeed, chocolate ice cream, wound through with thick ripples of fudge and marshmallow—her favorite, which she hadn't even thought Ianto knew. "Even a broken heart?" she asks after a moment, not lifting her eyes even as she carves her spoon into a twist where the fudge and marshmallow cross.

Ianto makes a soft sound, not quite noncommittal. "Eventually," he offers. "Time helps."

She laughs, and it's shockingly bitter, like wormwood on her tongue. "Time heals all wounds? I'll forget and everything will be all right again?"

Blue eyes settle on her again, deep and sad and far, far older than they should be, and Ianto slowly shakes his head. "No," he corrects gently, reaching out to close her hand around the spoon and guide it to her mouth. "It's not the forgetting that heals us. It's remembering. What did you love about her? What caught your eye? What was her smile like, her laugh, her frown? When you can remember all of that, it will start to get easier."

Tosh takes the bite of ice cream, and it's a dark, sweet delight on her tongue, cut through with the lightness of the marshmallow. She wants to protest, wants to deny the words, because thinking about those things _hurts_. Ianto looks at her, and it's obvious he knows that, too.

"Some things," he says softly, with the weariness of a lesson learned firsthand and at great cost, "must be made worse in order to heal. It will hurt far, far more before it hurts any less, and that's just the way things are."

Tosh thinks about a woman trapped in a prison of flesh and metal, forgetting herself and Ianto a little more each day, and shivers. At least she never had to _see_ Mary suffer. At least every memory she has up until the very end is relatively good.

There is no comparing heartbreaks, because nothing that hurts this much can ever be simple, but Tosh almost wishes she could. It would be nice to know that someone, somewhere, was hurting worse than she was.

(It's a cruel, ungrateful thought, and Ianto probably has, but she's tired enough and hurting enough that it gets through anyway.)

"All right. Bed for you." Ianto slides into the room, though she can't recall when he left. Tosh looks down at her ice cream in some surprise—it's mostly gone, and she can hardly remember a bite of it. But she's feeling a little steadier now, a bit more stable and less likely to go flying to pieces is she moves too suddenly. Ianto's hands are on her arm again, steering her carefully into her bedroom, and she braces herself to be overwhelmed by more memories.

And she is, of course, because this is the bed where she and Mary had had sex, and where Tosh had finally given in and admitted to what she felt. But it's not as bad as it could be, because Ianto has changed the linens and opened the windows to air it out a bit. A scented candle burns on the desk, leaving the room smelling like orange and mint instead of Mary's smoky spice.

Tosh wants to cry again.

Tomorrow, she promises herself. Tomorrow she'll go back to being quiet and strong, and letting Owen and Gwen's contempt slide off of her, immersing herself in her sensible, logical computers until she doesn't have to feel anything. But for now, here, tonight, she's going to be weak.

"Stay?" she whispers to Ianto as she slides under the new comforter.

Ianto smiles at her, empathy and sympathy in his eyes, but no pity. "All right," he agrees, already stripping out of his suit. "If you're certain."

She is. Just for tonight, she's not going to be a Torchwood field agent or brilliant computer tech. She's just going to be a woman with a broken heart, taking comfort from the quiet support of her best friend.

It's easier than she would have thought to drift off to sleep.


End file.
